HOLLYWOOD — Classical music superstar Hélène Grimaud has Brahms and wolves on her mind. After playing a sold-out concert here at the Hollywood Bowl, she plans to step into her dressing room, fire up her MacBook Pro laptop and check out video from the Wolf Conservation Center (nywolf.org) the non-profit facility she set up to ensure that endangered wolves thrive.

"It's a great way to observe them and be totally hands-off," she says of the Web monitoring.

Grimaud, who splits her time between Switzerland and New York and whose latest CD, The Brahms Concertos, will be in stores next week, begins a tour of Europe and Asia in October.

We met at the Bowl, where we discussed the wolf videos, why she can't live without Dropbox and why Twitter doesn't agree with her.

WOLF VIDEOS

Grimaud helped form the Wolf Conservation Center in 1996 after a chance meeting with a wolf in northern Florida that served as an inspiration to prevent the species from dying out. The center uses $2,000 Vivotek webcams to follow the wolves' moves without humans getting in the way. "They are very elusive creatures, and we want them to stay that way. These webcams are creating all the difference. You want to be hands-on and make sure the wolves are getting everything they need, but you don't want to be there too much, and have them be habituated to humans."

HOW SHE WATCHES

She usually fires open the laptop after a show to watch the videos, which are presented on the nywolf.org website. But she admits that with all the musical scores she carries (she hasn't switched to digital sheet music on the iPad yet) she sometimes gets "lazy," leaves the laptop behind and watches on her iPhone instead. "It's silly. You don't see much of anything. My tool of preference would be the laptop."

QUASI-SOCIAL

She prefers Facebook (where she has over 37,000 likes) to Twitter. On Facebook, she posts behind-the-scenes photos of concert venues and her travels (current shots are from Hamburg, Germany, Gstaad, Switzerland, and Los Angeles), while her Twitter feed features canned notes from her record company. Facebook "is a better match. I'm not the concise type. I don't speak in soundbites. For Twitter, you need that gift."

CLOSE

Classical pianist Hélène Grimaud talks about how she uses Spotify and Shazam for researching classical music.

FAVORITE APPS

— Point de Vue ($3.99, Apple). The app to identify the names of mountains just by pointing in their directions "is one of my favorites. You just hold it up, enter your location, and it will talk to you about the mountains in the vicinity. Anywhere you find yourself, you get all the names of the mountain peaks, the altitude and their names, so if you're looking at a panorama, you actually know what you're looking at."

— Spotify (free; Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Windows). She likes the music-streaming service to listen to music on her iPhone. Though her specialty is Brahms, she listens to "everything" on Spotify, including hip-hop, electronic and classical. As a working musician, "If you're doing research and trying to make decisions about repertoires and want to absorb things, it's a wonderful tool to taste, test and reflect."

— Shazam (free; Apple, Android, Windows, BlackBerry) is her other musical favorite to discover the names of songs. "It's so brilliant. You hear something, and how many times before that app, I would be scratching my head thinking, 'What was that? I have to know.' Now you just hold (your phone) up in the air, wherever you may be, whether in a restaurant, car, the airport, it's just fantastic." And it is not just for pop songs, she says. It can identify classical compositions, too. "It's non-discriminating."